Police Discipline and Community Policing: New Models

How police officers are disciplined for acts of misconduct affects how the community views the
police and how the police view their job. An agency that routinely fails to take proper action
when discovering that its officers have committed acts of misconduct will eventually lose its
credibility in the community. Intuitively we can see why: if officers feel that the discipline
system gives them no reason to obey the rules, some of them won’t. The public may see the
results in more acts of police misconduct. Likewise, if officers view the agency’s discipline as
captious or oppressive, they will often avoid the work that generates the most complaints: citizen
contacts.

Historically, the solution to the problem of proper discipline has been to “strike a balance”
between doing little about reports of misconduct and being oppressively harsh. This creates a
tension which, when properly managed, enforces compliance with agency rules without harming
agency relations with officers. That seems like a simple enough task: just do the right thing,
officer and agency, and all will be well.

But it often doesn’t work like that.

A Brief History

The traditional form of police discipline has been a standard punitive model that seeks to fit the
punishment to the offense. It is virtually universal in policing and mirrors a criminal justice
scheme in many respects, particularly in its notions of punishment, deterrence, and harsher
penalties for repeat offenders. Its end is to create an environment where officers comply with the
rules the way citizens obey the laws: get caught doing wrong and punishment follows. This has
seemed to work to constrain misconduct in part because the punitive model often succeeds at
firing officers who get caught committing gross misconduct. It also seems to work because there
has been no practical alternative: everyone does it this way—so why change?

Why Striking a Balance Doesn’t Quite Work

The tension between insufficient discipline and too much punishment is more difficult to manage
than is widely known. This was a point that recurred in a recent national conference on internal
affairs. The COPS Office, through a cooperative agreement entitled “Internal Affairs Network,”
Award No. 2003-HS-WX-K040, with the Los Angeles Police Department, funded the first-ever
ongoing major cities internal affairs network or community of practice. During the conference, a
group of police internal affairs executives (referred to as the Big 121) asked, among many other
things, how well each other was managing to strike the balance, and whether they were
achieving what they wanted. The particulars of the responses varied greatly, but every executive
agreed that the balance was too often perceived by officers, their leaders, or the public as
unachieved. Was there a better way than trying to strike a balance? Could it be that changing
the discipline model could solve some of the problems that traditional police discipline could
not?

Alternatives

Two members of the Big 12, the Los Angeles Police Department and the Houston Police
Department, had already begun looking beyond traditional police discipline2. The Houston
Police Department has begun working to create a constructive alternative model in which, rather
than merely issuing the standard suspension-without-pay punishments, officers could be
presented with the opportunity to do something constructive—literally. From the conference
report3 we find that “One example is offering an officer the opportunity to participate in
community projects within the jurisdiction, like doing free home repairs for persons who could
not otherwise afford the labor costs in the open market. While an officer could decline the offer
for the alternative activity, the system is nevertheless designed to increase the number of ways
employees’ actions can be reoriented to the Agency’s standards.”4 The innovation here is not
merely that the officer is presented with a constructive rather than negative disciplinary option
(although Houston’s model is innovative in that regard), but that the option simultaneously
serves two potent ends: it reorients the officer to the agency’s standards and provides help in
tangible ways to community members who most need it, thereby directly improving community-police relations.

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has begun to approach the problem from a different
framework. Operating from the notion that in dealing with misconduct, leaders should “think
first strategy, not penalty,” the LAPD is developing a model that sees disciplinary matters as
employee development questions.5 The question of penalty is subordinate to the question of
strategy: “A suspension or other punitive action isn’t necessarily the best way to induce
improved thinking and behavior for most employees. For the strategic model, the presumption is
that behavior changes by influencing the employee’s thinking toward acting on explicit
principles, not just rules.”6 In the developing LAPD strategic model, the question is not, “How
heavy should the penalty be?” but “What is the employee development solution?” The question
of striking the balance is irrelevant.

In one case, a supervisor facing discipline for causing several on-duty traffic accidents would
have faced a multiday suspension under the punitive model. Adopting the strategic model, the
supervisor’s captain interviewed him and determined that the supervisor was not intentionally
driving recklessly; he just was not considering the consequences of his driving decisions. The
remedial strategy included having the supervisor become a traffic officer’s trainee in a traffic
division assignment for a month, doing nothing but traffic collision investigations to see with
greater clarity the consequences of bad driving decisions. Whether the strategy was ideal is not
the issue: the point is that seeking a solution to the problem rather than seeking a number of
days-without-pay penalty is the essence of the strategic model.

Alternatives to Traditional Police Discipline and Community Oriented Policing

Whether through constructive discipline, the strategic model, or some other innovation, agencies
that field officers who are cultivated—not just regulated—are more capable of inspiring officers
to engage the community in partnerships with a clear sense of mission. Officers who realize that
their agencies are more concerned with developing them than punishing them are more likely to
hear their leaders’ call to community partnerships. And citizens who know that their legitimate
personnel complaints end in effective changes, not just disgruntled cops, are more likely to feel
confident in their police and the partnerships available to them.

Finding alternatives to traditional police discipline seems now to be an intriguing, unexplored
means to enrich community oriented policing. As the internal affairs community of practice
continues its discourse through videoconferencing, we look forward to finding other means of
improving officer development, and perhaps also revealing how discursive communities of
practice in fields typically not associated with community policing can improve it in novel,
unforeseen ways.

1 The Big 12 consisted of the following agencies in addition to the Los Angeles Police Department (the grant project
director): the Los Angeles County Sheriff and the municipal police departments of Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Detroit,
Chicago, Houston, Miami-Dade, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Washington, D.C. Part of purpose of the
conference was to create a community of practice among the Big 12 and to perpetuate discussions among them
through videoconferencing after the in-person sessions were complete.

2 A report titled “Internal Affairs Guidelines: Proceedings From a Community of Practice” was produced by the Big
12 and includes more details about the group’s thoughts on alternatives to traditional discipline. That report will be
available on the COPS Office web site.

3 Both here and in the conference report the models are only briefly described. Many important aspects of both
models are unstated here and are under development and adjustment by the two agencies as they work out their
theories and systems.

4 “Internal Affairs Guidelines: Proceedings From a Community of Practice,” pg. 49

5 This applies to nondischarge cases only; employees who commit egregious misconduct meriting immediate
discharge are presumed to be beyond the reach of employee development.